Significant time is lost by home users and small business alike in recovery operations due to user error, viruses, malfunctions or other failures. Back-up operations are onerous as well and most home and small business users do not have back-up procedures in place as does a large enterprise, which typically might perform a full system back-up weekly and incremental system back-ups daily. In this manner, should there be a system crash, an administrator or operator applies the appropriate back-ups after the fault/failure has been corrected. Thus, all but the most recent (since the last incremental back-up) data is restored.
Home users and small businesses often have no back-up procedures in place. It is often necessary to rebuild a HDD and then restore the contents. This is an onerous task and may take the better part of a work day leaving no time to get the real work of the business or home user done.
A number of proposals and products have been developed in this area. One such device is described by Gonen Ravid in U.S. Patent Application Publication No. 2002/0133747 A1 filed Mar. 13, 2001, hereinafter “Ravid”. Ravid describes a hardware-based recovery system. The Ravid system employs both working and back-up hard disk drives and, in particular, the HDD protection and recovery apparatus (controller board) 10 of Ravid is plugged in between the computer and a HDD of the system. When there is a failure of the working HDD, the back-up HDD can be put into use via an A-B switch 14. When the back-up HDD is not selected, it remains “invisible” to the operating system. According to the Ravid application, the back-up HDD can be accessed selectively and/or incrementally.
Other proposals and products are on the market but both the software and hardware instant recovery solutions have drawbacks. In conventional hardware computer recovery systems, when a personal computer has a failure, the computer can only return to a single previous state (e.g., the master disk hard image) and require positive user intervention for the back-up process. Most software solutions depend on a functioning operating system for carrying out restoration tasks. Those solutions, therefore, work only after the successful loading of a functioning operating system, such as MS-Windows.